When using their devices nowadays, users are subject to potentially a very large amount of what is referred to as herein “auxiliary content”. This is used to reference content which is not actually requested by a user but which is nevertheless directed to a user and played out at a user device (whether or not the user wants it). User devices include media players, such as digital video players, which are designed to play out at a screen or other output element of a user device auxiliary content which is received at that device in addition to content selected by a user.
Although users have not requested auxiliary content, they are generally tolerant of receiving and playing out a certain amount of auxiliary content, particularly where the receipt and play-out of that auxiliary content means that the user does not have to pay for the content that they did desire to receive. Auxiliary content can be provided in many different forms, including video content, static image, text based content, audio content. Although the present document is focussed mainly on the play-out of full media (video and audio) content, it will be appreciated that other forms of content are also available.
One particular type of auxiliary content is advertising content. The usual approach to targeted advertising consists in identifying users in a unique way, collecting user behaviour information either in an Ad server or in a dedicated remote system (a behavioural tracking system) and then using the collected information to classify the end-user to predefine behavioural classes. When the Ad server is being requested to provide advertising to a given user, the behavioural class the end user belongs to is then used to determine the most appropriate advert for him (for example, a user identified as a “Sportsman” is a likely candidate to receive advertising related to sports, goods and events). A disadvantage of this approach is that the user behaviour is collected by a third party behavioural tracking system and increasingly end-users are not tolerant to such a violation of their privacy. Already, many internet systems provide a “Do Not Track” feature that lets the end-users express a preference not to be tracked by websites. When the feature is enabled, advertising networks and other websites and applications are informed that the end-user has opted out of tracking for purposes like behavioural advertising and hence their behavioural information should not be collected. This means that users receive auxiliary content which is potentially of no relevance to them, but which consumes their time and device resources when played out.